It rained all Friday night. I was exhausted from work. I collapsed into my bed, but set an alarm for 6AM. There are two days a week I can sleep in. I ruined one of them. Why? Because I had to take this photo: I love this photo, and I could never have gotten it unless I got up early and got my ass to the right spot. It was only really about 10 minutes of prep: I looked up when the sun would rise – something like 6:42. I needed to get there a bit before...

There’s a lot of bad advice about lens filters. I’ll answer two big questions for you: Do I need a lens filter? If I get one, what kind should I get? Real fast, let’s go over what a lens filter is. Almost all modern lenses have a set of screw threads around the front of the lens. A lens filter is just a piece of glass that can screw onto the front of your lens. By using different kinds of materials, a lens filter can modify the way light goes through the lens – changing your picture. So… ...

Oh no! Something scratched the front of your lens? Don’t worry. It’s not that bad. Your lens has something called a “minimum focusing distance.” This means the lens can only focus on something that’s at least a bit away from it – for most lenses, this could be something like 6 inches (15cm). It’s often much further away. When something is really close to your lens, it becomes very out of focus. When it’s on your lens, it’s extremely out of focus. This means that anything close to your lens is so blurred out, that it hardly affects...

Infrared photography is a great style to try out – it’s fun, different, and inexpensive. That’s a rare combination in photography, and you get something really unique for it. So, what is it? Here are two examples. Only the colorblind would not notice that something is very different about this image. Clearly, the colors are strongly affected. This is how the image looks right from the camera – with funky red and purple tints. But the color isn’t the only thing that’s changed – pay close attention to brightness (white and black colors). To make it easier,...